Heat Transfer Enhancement Analysis of Al2O3-Water Nanofluid Through Parallel and Counter Flow in Shell and Tube Heat Exchangers

Abstract

Heat exchanger plays an essential part in industrial sector in transferring the heat energy. Heat is exchanged between fluids in convection and conduction mode through the walls of the heat exchanger. If the heat transfer medium has low thermal conductivity, it will greatly limit the efficiency of the heat exchanger. Whenever the system acts subjected to an increase in the heat load, heat fluxes caused by more power and smaller size, cooling is one of the technical challenges faced by the industries. The objective of this research work is to evaluate the overall heat transfer coefficient through an experimental analysis on the convective heat transfer and flow characteristics of a nanofluid. In our experiment, the nanofluid consists of water and one percentage volume concentration of Al2O3-water nanofluid flowing through parallel and counter flow in shell and tube heat exchangers. About 50[Formula: see text]nm diameter of Al2O3 nanoparticles was used in this analysis and found that the overall heat transfer coefficient and convective heat transfer coefficient of nanofluid were slightly higher than those of the base liquid at same mass flow rate and inlet temperature. Here, there are three samples of dissimilar mass flow rates, which have been identified for conducting the experiments and their results are continuously monitored and reported. Finally, the observed results through an experimental investigation were presented and concluded that the enhancement of overall heat transfer coefficient is likely to be feasible by means of increasing the mass flow rate of base fluid and prepared nanofluid on the proportional basis.